Even An East Texas Court Has Told Uniloc That It Can't Patent Math

from the there-are-limits,-people dept

Even a notoriously patent-friendly court like the district court in East Texas has admitted that there are limits to what's patentable. Notorious patent troll Uniloc, whose name has been appearing quite frequently lately, has lost one part of its big cases, against Rackspace, after the district court in Tyler, Texas has said one of the patents in question in this lawsuit, US Patent 5,892,697 on a "Method and apparatus for handling overflow and underflow in processing floating-point numbers," is really patenting basic mathematical functions, and you can't do that.

Claim 1, then, is merely an improvement on a mathematical formula. Even when tied to computing, since floating-point numbers are a computerized numeric format, the conversion of floating-point numbers has applications across fields as diverse as science, math, communications, security, graphics, and games. Thus, a patent on Claim 1 would cover vast end uses, impeding the onward march of science.

While this is nice, this is just one patent in that particular lawsuit, and Uniloc has dozens of other patents that it's using in other lawsuits. And Uniloc shows no signs of slowing down. Just the other day it filed 12 new lawsuits.

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Greed is a terrible thing in most cases, not all but most.
If anything i see them coming under a very bright spotlight , with very powerful people looking for anything to attack them, be it something from the distant past to something created on the spur of the moment, As always with these types their greed will be their downfall.

If the patent is for "Method and apparatus for handling overflow and underflow in processing floating-point numbers,"
...don't they actually have to have a working "apparatus"?
And if they have a working "apparatus", if somone has a different "apparatus" which achieves the same end result, it wouldn't violate their patent!

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"If the patent is for "Method and apparatus for handling overflow and underflow in processing floating-point numbers,"
...don't they actually have to have a working "apparatus"?
And if they have a working "apparatus", if somone has a different "apparatus" which achieves the same end result, it wouldn't violate their patent!"

Buffering...they drew up a patent for buffering data...by the looks of it graphics data...specifically 3D rendering and animation...and yes they are not patentable which is why most companies like nVidia and AMD keep those formulas a secret.